The Mask

For the record I finished another grotesque parody of a suspense novel by Dean Koontz, this one called The Mask. It was written using the Owen West pseudonym, which Koontz seemed to use for his particularly noxious volumes.

The story involves...ah, it's not worth the effort. Just stay away from this poison.

Dear MLB

Why is it, Major Leage Baseball, that you go out of your way to insist that I do not become more than a casual fan of your product? I like baseball, truly I do, and I want to be a fan. I played quite a bit when I was a kid, and was a hardcore fan from the ages of about 9 to 14 or so. When I lived in Arizona, the Diamondback games were broadcast on over the air television, allowing me to see a good number of them and become a genuine fan of the team representing my new metro area. I realize that's an unusual arrangement, and I understand that you normally make more money when you sell it to a cable channel instead. Hey, that's fine. I know you want to make money. But I will let you know that after I started watching the D-Backs on TV, it caused me to attend probably in the neighborhood of a dozen games or so in person per year and spend my money in your tax-payer funded ballpark.

So now I live in Washington, DC, and I thought it might be nice to become a fan of my new local team, the Washington Nationals. Even though they're not very good, I like to support the hometown guys. Of course, they're not on over the air TV regularly. I tell you though, it would sure be nice if you'd put an occasional game on the WB or something. It's awful hard to get into a team when you've never even heard of any the players, and its asking quite a bit for me to seek out games on the radio. As a result, I made it to one game last year. It was fine, but I wasn't clear on the context of the game. I didn't know who the regular starters were, didn't know the pitcher, and didn't have much an idea how the Nats season was shaping up to at that point. I'm not particularly bitter about this, I just want to you know that I'd like to be a fan, but I won't work for it. You're going to have to make it easy for me.

But, I am bitter about the National League playoffs this year. The D-Backs, a team that I still cheer for, were in the playoffs, as you know. Hey, I was excited! This was a good reason for me to tune in! And you put the games on TBS. Really? This is Major League Baseball, that can't get enough interest from a network for its playoffs? I don't get cable for a couple of reasons: one, it's expensive, and while I'm not destitute, TV is not a necessity; two, if I had cable, I would spend all my time watching TV, and I want to avoid that. So not having cable not only means that I can't closely follow my hometown team, but it also means that I cannot watch any of the National League playoffs prior to the World Series, along with the first series on the American League side. I hear the D-Backs played in a half dozen or so post-season games this year. I'd have liked to watch those. I'd like to be fan, if you'd only let me.

What is the Dark Tower?

Having recently finished the third book in the Dark Tower series, The Wasteleands, I want to make some informal, but English major-y, comments on the series thus far.

What is the Dark Tower? It is rare that there is such an obvious symbol in a decent book. Clearly, the Tower is supposed to stand for something, just like the whale in Moby-Dick has easily observable symbolic value (I am not comparing these two works, mind you). Yet, the meaning of the Tower has not yet been delineated, leaving readers to project their favorite subjects onto the Tower. And that's precisely what I am prepared to do.

But before getting to the Tower, I want to spend a moment on the characters. I have an idea that the Tower draws out certain characteristics in the individuals under its sway. Of course, everyone and everything in Mid-World is in one way or another "a servant of the Tower". Specifically what I am talking about is the duality that is accentuated in all the characters with which we are familiar:

Roland: on one hand he is the Arthurian knight, invincable, inhuman, and driven by incomprehensible forces and willing to sacrifice anyone in order to reach the Tower. Yet Roland is also the healer and teacher. He risks his life for those he has "drawn" into Mid-World, and though he is the informal leader of the group, he also knows he is a pawn in the Tower's game.

Eddie: in Eddie's case, there is the Eddie of before and after. Before his drawing, he is a heroin addict, but he is also imprisoned by his past, unable to escape the shadow of his failure brother. After his drawing, Eddie is able to come into his own, to find his stregth and talent.

Susannah: the most obvious case. She is literally two people trapped in the same body, one a 1960s civil rights activist, one a psychopath.

Jake: is in a way both dead and alive. Understanding and confronting his duality is Jake's major narrative arc in the first three books of the series.

So I think in part of the Tower is about duality and separation; this can be set against the concept of "ka-tet", or a fate that brings certain groups together, another reoccurring theme. But what do we really know about the Tower? Of course, we can see that Freud would suggest that the Tower is phallic, and I would add that it is supposed to be surrounded by a field of roses, also potent sexual symbols. However, the book is not heavy on sexual tension (though it does contain some sex scenes) and I think it would be difficult to go much further down that road. We know that everything serves the Tower in a way, even to the extent that plantlife tends to lean toward the Tower and compasses point to it.

I think one area worth exploring might be the Tower's relationship with technology. Those that have read The Stand already have some insight into King's thought on what technology does to society. Mid-World is filled with the husks of its high technology past. Some machines still work profitably, but there are others that are unexpectedly malevolent or ominous, including the strange train in this volume that is slowly going insane after hundreds of years of being worshiped by ignorant dwellers of a burnt out city, living in abandoned missile silos. It's not clear what happened to Mid-World, but it seems like some kind of very large scale nuclear war may have demolished the world. The technology that remains is sometimes useful, but almost always dangerous, too.

It's also the case the Mid-World is somehow expanding. The old maps show a much smaller world than the one that now exists. A journey that used to take a year, now takes 20. I would add that this might build on the theme that the Tower is a force that separates us and makes it more difficult to interact. Time is also unpredicable in Mid-World, and it seems likely that we will eventually learn that the Tower has some connection to the way people experience space and time, and may in fact be capable of being a doorway to other worlds.

This is all just speculation--the sort of thing I might think about before falling asleep at night. But I will say that The Wastelands is the most engaging of the books in this series thus far. It is far from perfect and I do not believe the Dark Tower to be King's best work, but I am relatively engrossed all the same. And if you're read T.S. Eliot, there are some inside jokes in this volume for you. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. I like that quote.

Do you know what will kill us? Global dimming, that's what.

For a long time I've had a sort of implicit optimism that humanity will eventually figure shit out and we'll more or less be okay, but that for the time being, things were seriously screwed up. Over the last year or so though, I've started having a nagging voice in my head suggesting that, in fact, we have passed some kind point of no return, and that environmental catastrophe is essentially a foregone conclusion, with no amount of changing behavior able to stop it. Recently, I learned that the nagging voice is correct. NOVA taught me about global dimming:

...Fossil fuel use, as well as producing greenhouse gases, creates other by-products. These by-products are also pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide, soot, and ash. These pollutants however, also change the properties of clouds.
Clouds are formed when water droplets are seeded by air-borne particles, such as pollen. Polluted air results in clouds with larger number of droplets than unpolluted clouds. This then makes those clouds more reflective. More of the sun’s heat and energy is therefore reflected back into space.
This reduction of heat reaching the earth is known as Global Dimming...

...Global Dimming is hiding the true power of Global Warming
The above impacts of global dimming have led to fears that global dimming has been hiding the true power of global warming.
Currently, most climate change models predict a 5 degrees increase in temperature over the next century, which is already considered extremely grave. However, global dimming has led to an underestimation of the power of global warming.

Addressing global dimming only will lead to massive global warming
Global dimming can be dealt with by cleaning up emissions.
However, if global dimming problems are only addressed, then the effects of global warming will increase even more. This may be what happened to Europe in 2003.
In Europe, various measures have been taken in recent years to clean up the emissions to reduce pollutants that create smog and other problems, but without reducing the greenhouse gas emissions in parallel. This seems to have had a few effects:
This may have already lessened the severity of droughts and failed rains in the Sahel.
However, it seems that it may have caused, or contributed to, the European heat wave in 2003 that killed thousands in France, saw forest fires in Portugal, and caused many other problems throughout the continent.
The documentary noted that the impacts of addressing global dimming only would increase global warming more rapidly. Irreversible damage would be only about 30 years away. Global level impacts would include:
The melting of ice in Greenland, which would lead to more rising sea levels. This in turn would impact many of our major world cities
Drying tropical rain forests would increase the risk of burning. This would release even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further increasing global warming effects. (Some countries have pushed for using “carbon sinks” to count as part of their emission targets. This has already been controversial because these store carbon dioxide that can be released into the atmosphere when burnt. Global dimming worries increase these concerns even more.)
These and other effects could combine to lead to an increase of 10 degrees centigrade in temperature over the next 100 years, not the standard 5 degrees which most models currently predict.
This would be a more rapid warming than any other time in history, the documentary noted. With such an increase,
Vegetation will die off even more quickly
Soil erosion will increase and food production will fail
A Sahara type of climate could be possible in places such as England, while other parts of the world would fare even worse.
Such an increase in temperature would also release one of the biggest stores of greenhouse gases on earth, methane hydrate, currently contained at the bottom of the earth’s oceans and known to destabilize with warming. This gas is eight times stronger than carbon dioxide in its greenhouse effect. As the documentary also added, due to the sheer amounts that would be released, by this time, whatever we would try to curb emissions, it would be too late.
“This is not a prediction,” the documentary said, “it is a warning of what will happen if we clean up the pollution while doing nothing about greenhouse gases.”

Good God, we're through.

Huxley Con't

Huxley's Those Barren Leaves is my second installment of the Huxley Week blog posts. It is never that is very similar to the earlier blogged about Antic Hay. It concerns a group of self-absorbed rich folk that fancy themselves artists and intellectuals. Mrs. Aldwinkle operates a sort of second class salon where this groups gathers. Huxley, like in Antic Hay, proceeds to show the true colors of the denizens of the salon, bringing out their hubris, pettiness, and vanity. It's not a bad novel by any stretch, but it doesn't feel like it has much vitality either. I praised Antic Hay because I felt Huxley was starting to draw some sympathetic characters along with his insightful "novel of ideas". Those Barren Leaves feels like a step backward from that. As usual, there are plenty of ideas in this novel, but we never know much about any characters really, and there are several that its difficult to even tell them apart. As in any Huxley book, this one has its moments, but they are far too few and far between.

Also, the cover the book is one of the most gimmicky book covers ever. As you can see, the tree is barren, but the back cover contains the foliage that would have gone on the tree. A caption on the back tells you to stare at the foliage for 30 seconds, then turn the book over and see the afterimage on the barren tree. It's like the thing you used to see on Perkins kids menus, where you stare at the American flag in yellow, green, and black and then look at white space to see the flag in the actual colors. Unbearably silly for the cover of a supposedly serious book.

Huxley Week

Did you know (and I bet you didn't) that all of Huxley's essays are available in a six-volume set, dutifully called, Complete Essays. I took the liberty of reading the first of these volumes, and I have to say, it's not for the casual fan. The first volume encompasses the years 1920-1925 and all the essays are more or less in the range of two to three pages in length. The book is split into four parts: art, music, politics, and travel. The first two sections are by far the longest, and for me, the most painful. I am not disinterested in either subject, but Huxley is deeply devoted to covering the contemporary scene in such a way that it makes for often trying reading, 80 years after the fact. And I am going to take back the first half of my "I am not disinterested" statement. I am, after all, disinterested in classical music, which is the only sort of music Huxley cares to talk about. He speaks of jazz with contempt.


The last portions of the book are more enjoyable, but it is still difficult to recommend them. Huxley has always been clever with his words (what else would he be clever with?) but there is little modern-day relevance to these writings. He has no insight into World War One, though it is somewhat interesting to read of the "uneasy peace" that he describes, knowing that World War Two is coming down the pike. The articles included in Complete Essays Vol 1were mostly pieces for Vanity Fair, a now defunct magazine called On the Margins, or the Westminster Gazette and the lack of substantial length really prevents Huxley from getting a good grip on a subject. The travel essays are reprinted from an early book of his called Along the Road.


It is an expensive and time-consuming book, recommended only for those who have a fanatical obsession with reading Huxley, such as I have had over the last few months.